B ill de Blasio should be having the best year of his political life.
The local economy in this city of 8.5 million is doing well. School test scores are up ever so slightly. The city’s crime statistics are headed in the right direction: murders down four percent from last year, robbery down 14.1 percent, felony assaults down nearly one percentage point.
The freshman Democratic mayor has achieved a host of policy goals—from raising the local minimum wage for certain workers to extending paid sick leave to thousands and implementing his signature universal pre-kindergarten program—that most liberal politicians only dream of.
And the plague of locusts some feared would descend on Wall Street with the election of an avowed progressive, the lover of Sandinistas, hasn’t materialized.
“If you take away the police stuff, I think he had a good year,” said George Arzt, a mainstay in city politics since his time as spokesman for Ed Koch, who also happened to work with de Blasio in the Clinton camp. “I think he’s the first mayor to come in with an agenda to change the city. I think that’s really important.”
And yet there have been missteps and challenges, with the police being the latest and possibly most explosive. The city’s police unions have been in open revolt since two of their own were murdered in a squad car in December, in apparent retaliation for the death of Eric Garner at the hands of police. De Blasio is also gearing up to battle a particularly miffed group of Republicans who now (again) control one of the state’s two legislative chambers.
And though de Blasio clearly has foes, a close look at some of the mayor’s troubles suggests that the person most likely to derail Bill de Blasio may be Bill de Blasio himself.
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De Blasio blazed into office with an historic landslide victory and an unabashedly liberal agenda.
When he took over a year ago, de Blasio quickly went to work on his top item, an ambitious plan to provide 73,250 free pre-kindergarten slots by the upcoming 2015-2016 school year. The mayor promised phase one would be complete by Year One: 13,845 new seats, spread between public school and community-based organizations, by the start of the school year in September. This was no easy “stroke of the pen achievement,” notes David Birdsell, dean of the School of Public Affairs at City University of New York’s Baruch College.
“There had been some skepticism about the mayor’s ability, and the administration’s ability, to follow through on something more complicated, that involved actually moving people, things, and budgets,” Birdsell said. Universal pre-Kindergarten “was a great test of that capacity, and it was a successful one.”
Not that de Blasio’s path to universal pre-K was flawless. The mayor wanted Albany to authorize a tax increase on the city’s highest income earners to pay the estimated $1.7 billion cost of the first five years of the program. The proposal initially fell flat in Albany, with both fellow Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state legislators—in particular, upstate and suburban Senate Republicans—balking at the idea of raising taxes in an election year. In the end, Cuomo presented a plan to essentially fund the city’s needs through the state budget. It was a victory for de Blasio, but one he appeared unwilling to claim: De Blasio countered that anything other than a tax-funded plan was unacceptable. Some might call it biting the hand that feeds you when you’re starving.
“He played that out to a fault,” said Birdsell.
De Blasio’s refusal to accept victory—maybe not the victory he wanted, but certainly the victory he needed—showed at best a political naivete (hard to imagine for as seasoned a political operative as de Blasio), or, at worst, an overestimation of his political might. At the time, the mayor was fond of talking about his mandate, of the 73 percent of city voters who’d sided with him, of the rising progressive vision—both locally and nationally—of ending inequality through a new age of liberal governance. (Never mind that only 24 percent of eligible city voters showed up.)
Talk to the mayor’s people and they shrug off the dustup between de Blasio and Cuomo. The mayor’s inflexibility, they say, was the kind of hardball needed to get things done in a state capital renowned for its dysfunction.
Beyond universal pre-K, de Blasio shepherded legislation extending paid sick leave to some 500,000 New Yorkers, signed into law a provision creating municipal ID cards for residents, including undocumented immigrants. Through an executive order, he single-handedly increased the minimum wage for employees of companies that receive at least $1 million in city subsidies. After going years without contracts, more than 71 percent of the city’s public sector workforce has signed new labor agreements, which the administration promises will remain budget friendly through mandated healthcare cost savings. There’s the Vision Zero plan to bring pedestrian deaths down that included installation of city-wide speed cameras and the lowering of the speed limit. De Blasio can also take credit for assuaging the anger of many struggling New Yorkers by rebooting stalled reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Even in moments of crisis, de Blasio’s team says planning played a key role. According to Peter Ragone, a top de Blasio aide and one of the most trusted voices in City Hall right now, de Blasio’s approach can be traced to the philosophy of legendary UCLA basketball Coach John Wooden: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” De Blasio repeats these words, Ragone says, “many times a week.”
“You plan as much as you can for the things you want to do, because then the things that happen to you—because things happen to you here—when those occur, you’re better to prepared to deal with them, because all the other aspects of government are being run effectively,” Ragone says during a New Year’s Eve interview.
Leading up to the Ebola scare in the city, de Blasio told his aides to stop thinking as if it might happen and start thinking that it would happen.
“We moved the entire government for two months preparing for it,” Ragone says, referring to the city’s crafting of a plan of action for first responders, HAZMAT units and public hospitals in the event a case was reported.
When it finally came—in the form of a New York physician recently returned from Africa—de Blasio looked like the calm statesman in the crisis, while Cuomo and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vacillated between various draconian measures, such as forced quarantines, before falling in behind de Blasio’s practical solutions for containing what turned out to be a single case of the disease.
